Haifaa al-Mansour: I wanted to have a voice

Saudi Arabia's leading film director, Haifaa al-Mansour, says the taboos of
her country, where women aren’t supposed to ride bikes, drive cars or show
their faces, let alone make groundbreaking films, are there to be broken. Horatia
Harrod meets her.

It’s hard to imagine becoming a filmmaker in a country with no cinemas. It’s especially hard if that country is Saudi Arabia, and you happen to be a woman, forbidden to drive, or show your face in public, or travel in or out of the country without permission.

(Every time a Saudi Arabian woman crosses the border a text message alert is sent to her male guardian, who could be her father, husband or son.)

Haifaa al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s first female film director and the first person to shoot a film entirely in Saudi Arabia, was 30 years old when she decided she’d had enough.

Born and raised there, she went to university in Cairo before returning and finding a job in media relations with a leading oil company.

'It was hard as a single woman to find a place to live,’ says al-Mansour. 'They wouldn’t write a [rental] contract for an apartment until my father came and helped.'

'And then I had to find a driver to take me to work every day – and he didn’t show up, or slept in. I bought him an alarm, but he sold the alarm.’

She says, 'I felt, “I’m so invisible, nobody cares and I am no one.” I wanted to have a voice, and I wanted to say something.’

Al-Mansour began by making short films, studies of the restrictive lives of Saudi Arabian women. They won her both notoriety and awards in the Gulf region. Ten years later her first feature, Wadjda, is collecting prizes at film festivals around the world and is about to be released in Britain.

Al-Mansour directing Wadjda

We meet at the Wolseley restaurant in London a few days after Wadjda has been shown to great acclaim at the London Film Festival.

It is a simple story, with the directness and immediacy of the great Italian neorealist films of the 1940s. The title character, a tomboyish 10-year-old girl, sees a green bicycle and decides to buy it. But it is considered scandalous in much of Saudi Arabia for a girl to ride a bicycle.

'Bicycles represent a lot,’ says al-Mansour. Freedom of movement, for one. 'Being in charge of your destiny. When bicycles were introduced in the West, women’s clothing changed. The bicycle carries a lot of meaning, but it carries it gently.’

Al-Mansour is 39, but her face is childlike and she seems elated, smiling almost continuously. This is not to say that she comes across as naive; in fact, she’s measured and diplomatic, even evasive. 'These are sensitive issues,’ she says carefully, more than once.

She directed Wadjda hidden out of sight in a van, communicating via a walkie-talkie. Even with her confined to the van, people would often make their displeasure known. 'Films are controversial in Saudi,’ she says.

'Sometimes people would tell us to go away, or interfere in the picture. We’d have to leave, but because of continuity we’d have to go back. It was like Tom and Jerry.’

The film is a rare opportunity to peer into the private world of Saudi Arabia’s women and to understand that nothing about the country is straightforward.

Wadjda’s mother is trying to cling on to her husband, who loves her but is seeking a second wife to bear him a son. Wadjda’s headmistress wears red-soled Louboutin stilettos beneath her abaya (body covering), yet is ferociously orthodox.

She silences a group of chatting girls, telling them that to be heard is 'to be naked’.

Al-Mansour was intent on using Saudi Arabian actresses, of whom there are very few. 'A lot of actresses have problems with their families,’ she says. 'The families denounce them, cut off relations with them, so they are alone against the whole world. I respect them so much for their courage.’

She auditioned many girls for the part of Wadjda, but not one embodied the qualities of humour and feistiness and innocence that she sought. With a week to go, panic had set in.

Wadjda stars 11-year-old Waad Mohammed

'And then,’ says al-Mansour, 'this girl walked in with curly hair, wearing a 1980s-style jersey and high-tops and listening to Justin Bieber, even though she doesn’t speak a word of English. And she was just what I wanted.’

The girl was Waad Mohammed, an 11-year-old from Riyadh. Mohammed’s family are conservative, middle-class Saudi Arabians. They allowed their daughter to take the part because she is not yet a woman.

'They’ve told her that she can act until she’s 16,’ says al-Mansour, 'and after that she has to have a respectable profession. But she really shines when she has the camera on her, and she has this rebellious thing in her, so I feel she will resist.’

Haifaa al-Mansour grew up in the east of Saudi Arabia, the eighth of 12 children, in a large, rambling house. Her heart belongs to her home town, Al-Hasa.

'I love the coffee and the food,’ she says, 'and the old women with henna on their hands. It reminds me of who I am.’

Some of her brothers have told her 'they wouldn’t let their daughters act. We argue about it very often and I feel it’s nice to be that way. We accept each other, even with our differences.’

Her father, who died five years ago, and about whom she still speaks with awe, was a legal adviser and a poet. When he was a young man, he left his conservative family’s farm to go to university and returned with new ideas.

'He had the notion,’ says al-Mansour, 'that education is important, that equality is important.’

Al-Mansour’s mother came from a more liberal family; her cousins were among the 47 women arrested in 1991 for driving their cars through central Riyadh in protest against the law forbidding it.

(In 2007, when al-Mansour married an American diplomat in Saudi Arabia, she sent up these restrictions by driving herself to the ceremony in a golf buggy.)

'My parents never put a ceiling on my dreams,’ she says. Some of her childhood friends were married off right after school but she, she says, 'never felt like there were things I could not do because I was a girl’.

Her father as a student in Cairo in the 1950s

In their small town her family were known as 'the secularists’ and al-Mansour’s friends weren’t allowed to visit. At school, she says, she was 'shy and awkward’.

But at home, she would ride her bike – bought for her by her father, despite the disapproval of the shopkeeper – up and down the corridors.

Is the film autobiographical? 'Yes and no. Everybody in it is based on a person I encountered at some point. Wadjda is very much based on my niece, whose father is quite conservative, and some of my classmates [from school], who never got the chance to do what they wanted.’

Though cinemas are entirely banned in Saudi, videos and DVDs are easy to get hold of. When al-Mansour was a child, 'we watched a lot of kids’ films, mainstream film, Disney, whatever was available.

At video stores in Saudi they don’t go for intellectual films. Jackie Chan – we loved that! We used to watch a film and then fight.’

Encouraged by her family, she left at 18 to study at the American University in Cairo, where she bought an old Hyundai – red, much loved, with one working door – and learnt to drive.

Her early short films were powered by a sense of outrage at the way women were treated in the kingdom. The first, Who?(2003), was a seven-minute-long fiction about a male serial killer who dons the abaya and niqab (face veil) to murder women.

The story was based on a Saudi Arabian urban myth, but for al-Mansour it was a powerful allegory for both the fear Saudi Arabian men have of women and the unease she herself felt when speaking to a fully covered woman.

'I got lots of hate mail after Who?’ she says. 'People said that I don’t respect my own culture, that I am not religious. It’s not true.’

How important is Islam to her? 'At a certain point everybody chooses their own values. I don’t insult Islam but nor do I accept things that don’t make sense.’

Two years later she made Women Without Shadows, a documentary about the niqab.

One of her interviewees was a cleric, Sheikh Ayed al-Qarni, who said that there was nothing in Islamic law to say that women must be veiled.

As the film gained momentum, shown on television and in film festivals around the region, al-Qarni recanted. 'He sent a written statement to all the television channels, retracting what he said in the film.’ She laughs. 'I think he overreacted.’

Al-Mansour laughs easily, and seems almost blasé about the risks of what she is doing. 'When you start to be a public figure in Saudi, especially if you are a woman, you expect things like this.’

Scene from Wadjda: Waad Mohammed riding a bike

Despite the death threats and hate mail, al-Mansour’s intention is 'to be gentle, not confrontational’, she says.

'I want to work in Saudi and work within the system, and have my voice heard in Saudi, rather than just be an outsider.’

Wadjda can’t be shown there, which al-Mansour says is 'a little bit heart-breaking’, but when it screened in nearby Doha and Dubai, many Saudi Arabians travelled to see it.

'I think the majority of people – the mainstream, normal people – will enjoy it,’ says al-Mansour. Her sisters were amazed at how authentically it portrayed Saudi Arabian life.

'My veiled sister loved it. And she’s my target audience. She’s educated but she’s still conservative, and she really saw her life in the film.’

Al-Mansour hopes the film will be shown on television in Saudi Arabia at some point, and she does have supporters in high places. The man who secured the funding for Wadjda is the most colourful of the kingdom’s 7,000 princes, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

He is famous for several things, including owning a series of spectacularly lavish private jets (one of which he sold to Muammar Gaddafi for £80 million) and complaining to Forbes magazine for underestimating his wealth (they said £13.4 billion; he says £20 billion).

But in Saudi Arabia he is known as one of the most forward-thinking princes on the issue of women’s rights. Two thirds of his staff are women – among them the kingdom’s first female pilot – and he encourages them to abandon the veil.

His very glamorous, unveiled wife, Princess Ameerah, has appeared on Western television (including Piers Morgan’s CNN programme) championing the cause of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia.

'He’s individualistic and entrepreneurial,’ says al-Mansour. The prince holds large stakes in Apple, News Corporation and Twitter. 'He’s one of the younger princes, and they are the promise for the country.’

There are a few green shoots of change. Seventy five per cent of Saudi Arabia’s citizens are under 30, and they are connected to the world like never before, thanks mostly to the internet, but also to the massive King Abdullah Scholarship Programme, which sends some 100,000 students to study abroad every year.

Haifaa al-Mansour on her wedding day in 2007

That said, the monarchy has recently attempted to strip Saudi Arabian Twitter users of their anonymity. In April it threatened to ban Skype, WhatsApp and Viber, if service providers did not allow the authorities to censor and monitor them.

And that followed the sentencing of two human rights activists to 10 years’ imprisonment on charges of sedition, founding an unlicensed human rights group (calling for an elected parliament) and disobeying the king.

'Nothing comes for free’, says al-Mansour. 'I would like my daughter to be able to live in Saudi, but I want people to respect her, I want her to feel she has ownership of things.

It’s easy to surrender to the status quo and live life like everybody else. If Saudi girls want to change their situation, they have to fight.’

It is a battle in which they are very, very gradually gaining ground. In January this year 30 women – 27 of whom have doctorates – were appointed to the Shura council, which offers advice to the king. In 2015 women will be allowed to stand for and vote in municipal elections.

And, by an odd coincidence, in April this year women were given official permission to ride bicycles in public.